Meet the super agent for the Internet

About five years ago, Kate McKean’s older brother sent her a link that he thought she’d like. Clicking on it, she found a woman calling herself Allison Hewitt who was “blogging the zombie apocalypse,” she says, “in real time.” McKean loved the writing. “But what really got me was that readers were participating,” she says. They were posting comments like: “chicago gone too. get out of city, get out as fast as you can.”

McKean, an agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, saw a potential book deal—not with Allison Hewitt, a fictional blogger who worked in a bookstore while the undead overtook the world, but with her creator, the anonymous Madeleine Roux, then an aspiring author living in Wisconsin.

By 2014, with McKean’s help, Roux had published two zombie novels with St. Martin’s Press and two young-adult novels with HarperCollins, one of which, Asylum, became a New York Times Best Seller. Roux’s fifth book will arrive this September.

Dubbed “the Internet’s agent,” McKean, a confirmed Southerner now living in Brooklyn, is a new kind of literary agent, one of a handful who not only promote their clients online but also find them there. Like the Internet itself, Internet agenting is evolving.

Way back in 2002, bloggers were all the rage. Unknowns like Julie Powell, mastering the art of Julia Child’s cooking, bubbled up, attracting a following that led Sarah Chalfant of the Wiley Agency to score a reported six-figure deal with Little, Brown and Nora Ephron to direct Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. (A recent, similar stunt had a reporter preparing 300 sandwiches in exchange for an engagement ring—an “epic journey of bread and betrothal,” reads the pending book’s promotional copy—and was deemed calculating by its many detractors.)

By 2007, the so-called “iterative meme” was proliferating, with McKean at the forefront. She signed a deal with Gotham for a book based on the virally popular running-joke blog I Can Has Cheezburger?, a compilation of cat photos with ungrammatical captions. “People were talking about it,” she says, “and I saw it and thought, Great content, super funny, and it’s about cats. Cats sell.” The blog begat Cheezburger, Inc., a veritable industry of spinoffs and books, two of them Times Best Sellers. It has also spawned a swarm of superstar cats and the field of “meme management”—one Hollywood talent agent represents Grumpy Cat, Nyan Cat, and Keyboard Cat, along with some human memes like Scumbag Steve.

Over the years, as personal blogs have been eclipsed by websites like The Awl and The Toast, client spotting increasingly happens there, as well as on social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Instagram.

Snapchat, however, has yet to birth a major star. McKean, 35, isn’t a fan. “I literally don’t get it,” she says.

Where clicks were once crucial to selling books to publishers, now the prevailing metrics are shares and likes—actions that show audience engagement. A large number of followers is good, but a large number of retweets is better. For McKean, that means scouting resonant voices that she believes have more staying power than a succession of punch lines, like Mallory Ortberg, co-founder of The Toast, whose book, Texts from Jane Eyre, originated as a web series on The Hairpin and became a Times Best Seller.

As with all developments in publishing, the Internet-to-book boom has prompted predictions that the invasion of digital zombies and cats spells the end of the industry, or of Western civilization. McKean references the “ten-cent plague,” the viral midcentury fear that comic books were creating a generation of juvenile delinquents.

Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, a prestigious HarperCollins imprint, cites cheap mass-market paperbacks, CD-ROMs, and computers themselves as past supposed literature slayers. “People said, ‘Oh, my God, authors are gonna write too long because they don’t have to retype,” says Halpern, who is also a poet. He wasn’t familiar with Texts from Jane Eyre, but when told that it was a series of imagined smart-phone exchanges between famous fictional characters (King Lear’s opener: “okay who wants a kingdom”; “me me i do”), he said, “That sounds great.”

In some ways this new publishing order is selling the same old product on an updated platform. What is CDB, William Steig’s 1968 illustrated wordplay classic, if not an iterative meme? When Stuff White People Like scored a reported $300,000 deal from Random House in 2008, GalleyCat reminded readers that Martin Mull had capitalized on the same conceit 23 years earlier with The History of White People in America. McKean points out that Garfield is the ancestor of Grumpy and friends.

“There have always been bad books,” says Halpern, who doesn’t worry that they’ll crowd out the good ones. “Whatever the format, the first step is somebody sitting down to write the book, and that won’t change.”

Among those hopefuls is McKean, who lives with her husband of four months and is allergic to non-pixilated cats. “I have a novel in a box,” she says. It’s a young-adult story about entrepreneurial kids and the Internet, but “it is a huge mess, so I am letting it sit until I feel like doing it again.” Maybe the next iteration will click.

Susan Chumsky is a writer and editor in New York City. Her favorite children’s book is the proto–interative meme CDB.

What the Times’ Jill Abramson did manage well

FORTUNE — Jaws collectively dropped in the media fishbowl yesterday with the announcement that New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson was losing her job. Even the Times‘ crack reporters were initially “gob-smacked” by the news in their front yard, delivered to them by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — who merely said that Abramson had been dismissed over “an issue with management in the newsroom.”

But in all the talk about Abramson’s management style — and the important debate about whether or not women executives are held to a double standard — there has been little said on a topic that may be most relevant of all: In a just plain lousy environment for traditional broadsheets, Abramson’s newsroom was managing far better than most.

In the past decade, newspapers — the most bludgeoned segment of the ink-on-paper realm — have shut down, cut staff, gone online-only, thrown up paywalls, and/or outsourced content-producing to less vetted, lesser paid (if vetted and paid at all) community members and “contributors.” For a brief time, the Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle even relied on computer algorithms and a corps of writers in the Philippines.

Yet while much of old media remains adrift (and still trying to figure out how to turn that thing called the Internet into a sustainable business model), The Gray Lady has managed its digital transformation relatively well. Its website leads the industry in delivering old-school journalism with new-age enhancement from data visualizations to video. Abramson, who spent her executive editorship with one foot in the future (and at the occasional tech media conference), deserves some credit for this.

Her tenure, which began months after the paper put up its paywall, brought a handful of digital initiatives that have served as models for the industry. In December 2012, the Times debuted a new digital storytelling platform for “Snow Fall,” a long-form narrative written by John Branch. The platform demonstrated both new creative and revenue-generating possibility for multimedia storytelling, and has become so widely admired and imitated by media companies, that the form itself is now known as Snowfall.

In March, the Times launched a handful of subscription digital products, including an app that curates news and others that highlight areas of coverage like food and opinion. It’s too early to know how well these have worked, but that Abramson committed newsroom resources to them is something.

As Reed Phillips, of the media investment bank DeSilva and Phillips told me at the time, “My impression is these products are trial balloons, but at least they’re innovating. That’s the most important thing.”

He added, “They’re clearly the leader among U.S. newspapers in how they’re approaching the future of news.”

In any case, Abramson was clearly focused on the modern-day challenges of delivering the news. She and her successor, Dean Baquet, commissioned a team of journalists — headed by Sulzberger’s son, A.G. — to develop an Innovation Report for the Times. The group spent several months on the study and their findings — ahem, that the Times needs to move faster — were shared last week.

Ironically, that report led some to suggest that it was Abramson’s fault that the newsroom wasn’t further ahead.

Like it or not, here’s the universal scoring system for journalism

Imagine an Olympic sport without any universal quantitative metrics. Thousands of hyper-competitive athletes competing furiously with each other, but only able to keep score by chatter at cocktail parties and compliments from their colleagues. Welcome to the world of journalism for the past several centuries.

In the age of print, circulation numbers were dubious at best and there was of course no way for anyone to tell how much a given article in a newspaper or magazine was read relative to another.

The web had the potential to change that starting in the 90s, but with rare exceptions it didn’t. While publishers could track stats like pageviews or unique visitors for every article using tools like Google GOOG Analytics or Omniture ADBE, most never released granular data to the public or even their own writers. On a panel, news executives will say they don’t make stats available to staff because they don’t want their journalists writing for pageviews, but given that publishers have long been optimizing their entire online businesses for pageviews a skeptical observer might wonder if they withhold the data to keep stars from demanding raises or leaks of dismal traffic from occurring.

If journalism is a marathon, the stopwatch has just been invented. The social web now provides universal, publicly accessible, metrics on which to judge an article in the form of Twitter, Facebook FB, LinkedIn LNKD and Google+ shares — let’s call them social shares.

Social networks didn’t set out to provide this data, it’s a byproduct of their bids to get their share widgets (which feature the share count) on every webpage. The concept was popularized by Digg which encouraged publishers to put Digg buttons on article pages. As Digg faded from popularity, Facebook’s like button and Twitter’s tweet widget took center stage. It’s now became a standard social feature.

While only some publishers choose to display the social share data on their web pages, the data is available for any page on the web to anyone for free through a simple API call. It’s hard to understate how much this is changing the game of online content. Publishers no longer control some of the most important analytic data. Writers know how well their work is performing in realtime. Competitors can analyze which articles are successful or duds in rival publications. As I wrote in a prior column, public relations executives can gauge the impact of a story about their clients. Even governments can monitor (without a FISA request) the resonance a muckraking story has.

Any new metric invites a vigorous debate on how healthy it is — the value of the pageview has been hotly debated for over a decade — and the social share has its pros and cons. I’ll leave that analysis for another column. In the meantime, writers better prepare to be judged by the social share since it’s the only universal metric for articles in town.

Gregory Galant‘s the CEO of Muck Rack, the social network for journalists and companies in the news. He’s also the cocreator of the Shorty Awards which honors the best of social media. Galant advises several startups and is a mentor in the TechStars startup accelerator. Follow him on Twitter.